Reader Services By the Numbers

As the fiscal year comes to a close it is time to examine the statistics the reader services staff compiles over the course of the year. Here is a quick rundown of what FY2011 brought to the MHS library.

The library was open 287 days with an average daily attendance of 9.6 researchers.

We were visited by 1353 individual researchers for a total of 2766 research visits.

718 of our researchers were using the MHS library for the first time.

Of those first time visitors, 314 were Massachusetts residents, 357 were out-of-state visitors, and 47 were foreign nationals. In all we had visitors from 40 different states and more than 20 countries.

The reader services staff paged 2888 manuscripts requests and 1900 printed materials requests. Considering that most requests require multiple boxes or volumes, that is a lot of material paged.

Because not every researcher that uses MHS resources can visit us in person the reader services staff also answered 1335 reference emails, 70 mailed reference letters, and 1260 reference phone calls.

The library has been experiencing a steady increase in both total readers and new readers over the past few years. Here is hoping that trend continues into FY2012